Hit Man

else he’s learned to walk around without one.”
    “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to hear it. You know what I think you should do, Keller? I think you should check out of that motel and get on a plane.”
    “And come home?”
    “Got it in one, Keller, but then you were always quick.”
    “The client canceled?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Then—”
    “Fly home,” she said, “and then catch a train to White Plains, and I’ll pour you a nice glass of iced tea. And I’ll explain all.”
    It wasn’t iced tea, it was lemonade. He sat in a wicker chair on the wraparound porch of the big house on Taunton Place sipping a big glass of it. Dot, wearing a blue and white housedress and a pair of white flip-flops, perched on the wooden railing.
    “I just got those the day before yesterday,” she said, pointing. “Wind chimes. I was watching QVC and they caught me in a weak moment.”
    “It could have been a Pocket Fisherman.”
    “It might as well be,” she said, “for all the breeze we’ve been getting. But how do you like this for coincidence, Keller? There you are, off doing a job in Cincinnati, and we get a call, another client with a job just down your street.”
    “Down my street?”
    “Or up your alley. I think it’s a Briticism, down your street, but we’re in America, so the hell with it. It’s up your alley.”
    “If you say so.”
    “And you’ll never guess where this second caller lives.”
    “Cincinnati,” he said.
    “Give the man a cigar.”
    He frowned. “So there’s two jobs in the same metropolitan area,” he said. “That would be a reason to do them both in one trip, assuming it was possible. Save airfare, I suppose, if that matters. Save finding a room and settling in. Instead I’m back here with neither job done, which doesn’t make sense. So there’s more to it.”
    “Give the man a cigar and light it for him.”
    “Puff puff,” Keller said. “The jobs are connected somehow, and I’d better know all about it up front or I might step on my own whatsit.”
    “And we wouldn’t want anything to happen to your whatsit.”
    “Right. What’s the connection? Same client for both jobs?”
    She shook her head.
    “Different clients. Same target ? Did the fat man manage to piss off two different people to the point where they both called us within days of each other?”
    “Be something, wouldn’t it?”
    “Well, pissing people off is like anything else,” he said. “Certain people have a knack for it. But that’s not it.”
    “No.”
    “Different targets.”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “Different targets, different clients. Same time, same place, but everything else is different. So? Help me out on this, Dot. I’m not getting anywhere.”
    “Keller,” she said, “you’re doing fine.”
    “Four people, all of them different. The fat man and the guy who hired us to hit him, and target number two and client number two, and. . . ”
    “Is day beginning to break? Is light beginning to dawn?”
    “The fat man wants to hire us,” he said. “To kill our original client.”
    “Give the man an exploding cigar.”
    “A hires us to kill B, and B hires us to kill A.”
    “That’s a little algebraic for me, but it makes the point.”
    “The contracts couldn’t have come direct,” he said. “They were brokered, right? Because the fat man’s not a wise guy. He could be a little mobbed up, the way some businessmen are, but he wouldn’t know to call here.”
    “He came through somebody,” Dot agreed.
    “And so did the other guy. Different brokers, of course.”
    “Of course.”
    “And they both called here.” He raised his eyes significantly to the ceiling. “And what did he do, Dot? Say yes to both of them?”
    “That’s what he did.”
    “Why, for God’s sake? We’ve already got a client, we can’t take an assignment to kill him, especially from somebody we’ve already agreed to take out.”
    “The ethics of the situation bother you, Keller?”
    “This is good,” he said, brandishing the lemonade. “This from a mix or what?”
    “Homemade. Real lemons, real sugar.”
    “Makes a difference,” he said. “Ethics? What do I know about ethics? It’s just no way to do business, that’s all. What’s the broker going to think?”
    “Which broker?”
    “The one whose client gets killed. What’s he going to say?”
    “What would you have done, Keller? If you were him, and you got the second call days after the first one.”
    He thought about